Friel's Ballybeggared Version of Chekhov

Friel's Ballybeggared Version ofChekhov DA VID KRAUSE In his dramatization of the cyclical theme of aspiration and frustration which afflicts his hopeful but tormented characters, Brian Friel's impressive achievements have often been compared to the masterful plays of Chekhov, a tribute he has earned in many of his works, particularly Aristocrats, Faith Healer, and Translations. Friel is at the top of this recurring confrontation when the people in his mythic Ballybeg are caught between a quest for past ideals and a collision with grim realities. His affinity with Chekhov is readily apparent in his indigenously Irish treatment of this universal theme of denied expectations. Ironically, however, and curiously, when he "translated" Three Sisters that is, based his version upon earlier translations - he decided it was necessary to modify Chekhov's flawless original text by adding an anachronistically Irish peasant quality to this distinctively genteel and finely crafted Russian play. Apparently motivated in part by a strong impulse of Irish cultural politics that required a rejection of what he thought were the previously and predominantly "British" translations of Chekhov's play, Friel was initially reacting against those versions of Three S~sters that, he said, "always seem to be redolent of either Edwardian England or the Bloomsbury set. Somehow the rhythms of these versions do not match with the rhythms of our own speech patterns, and I think they ought to, in some way.'" While it was valid for Friel to protest against the use of affected Edwardian or Bloomsbury speech rhythms for Chekhov's play, why did he presume that all he had to do to solve the problem was to include a good dose of Irish speech patterns in his own "translation"? Why did he fail to realize that a translation that was most faithful to the Russian text would be preferable to the intrusion of either British or Irish voices? And why did he end up by patronizing Irish audiences with the claim that they could appreciate Chekhov only if his universally accessible plays were rendered in localized Irish versions ? Did this also imply that the plays of all foreign or non-Irish dramatists, Modern Drama, 42 (Winter 1999) 634 Friel's BaUybeggared Chekhov not only Chekhov but Ibsen, Pirandello, and Lorca, for example, to say nothing of "foreign" American plays, would have to be properly "Irished," in some unique Frielian way, in order to accommodate them to what he called "the language which we speak in Ireland"?' Some answers to these teasing questions might be found in the context of Friel's cultural war with England, since he says he had begun to think of writing a play about the British imperialist translation or suppression of Irish traditional and cultural values when he was "translating" his version of Chekhov: "The work I did on Three Sisters somehow overlapped into the working of the text of Translations."3 Unfortunately, the unintentional overlapping of those two plays, which raised different kinds of translation problems, produced in one instance a passionately political as well as poetic work that exposed centuries of British injustice in Ireland, and in the other instance a hybrid antiEnglish language free translation or Irish interpretation of Chekhov's apolitical play. In 1980 and 1981, when he wrote these two plays, the conscience-driven Friel was clearly on the cultural and political warpath. After finishing his exposure of British misrule in Translations, and still full of a festering distrust of the British English language, he set out to write his own Irish English-language version of Three Sisters. He began by examining six standard English translations, most of which he felt were tainted by what he called "very strong English cadences and rhythms. This is something about which I feel strongly - in some way we are constantly overshadowed by the sound of the English language, as well as by the printed word.'" This, he concluded, was a dangerous thing "that is neither healthy nor valuable to US."5 Therefore, although he had no knowledge of the Russian language, Friel studied the previous translations and began to write a version of Three Sisters that he was convinced would be healthy and valuable for Ireland. It will...